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Freezers fished well this summer

HB Grandi’s freezer trawlers have fished well this summer. A good part of the summer for Therney RE and Örfirisey RE went into the mackerel fishery with some excellent results. These two are now back on groundfish, along with Höfrungur III AK, which has stayed on groundfish all year.

Höfrungur III docked last Sunday and according to this trip’s skipper, Haraldur Árnason, the trip was a respectable one, starting on Westfjords grounds where there has been some good fishing on saithe this summer. There were,some fine catches of haddock on the Strand shallows, as well as redfish and cod fishing on the Hali banks.

‘Towards the end of the trip we steamed to the east coast and fished for Greenland halibut in the Héradsflói Deeps, the Seydisfjördur Deeps and south of the “Foot,” as it’s called. Catches weren’t bad, but the Greenland halibut keep to a fairly small area that won’t take more than day’s fishing before you have to move on,’ he said and added that after that they went for redfish and cod south of Hvalbak, going both east and west of that area as the trip came to an end.

Still doing well on saithe

Therney RE is due to dock in Reykjavík next Sunday and when we spoke to skipper Ægir Franzson around midday, they were on the Horn Banks.

‘We’re chasing haddock at the moment. There was plenty of haddock yesterday but it’s quieter today. But we’ve only been here a day so it’s too early to say how it’s going to continue,’ he said, commenting that there has been some excellent fishing on saithe on the Westfjords grounds this summer and especially over the last few weeks. There was a period of good fishing on redfish on the Hali Banks and there is no problem finding cod over a wide area.

‘Redfish on the Westfjords grounds has surprised many these last few years, as it was thought that redfish preferred to stay further south. We may well have been mistaken, as the old skippers used to talk about heavy redfish fishing off the Westfjords in the old days. The spread of haddock northwards is another matter entirely and then there’s the mackerel. We saw a lot of mackerel on the Horn Bank a couple of days ago. We assume that the mackerel like a temperature of 10-12°C at the surface, but they seem happy enough to swim through water that’s around 7°C, as it is here,’ Ægir Franzson said.